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Software and mission support for government contractors

Solutions and expertise
built for your mission.

We build the software, the systems and the responses that small and midsize contractors need to compete. Founder-led, deliberately small, and fast enough to matter.

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Status
Disability-Owned Business

01Who we work with

Contractors who needed something built, not advised on

Every mark below is labelled by what the relationship actually is. We do not present a wall of logos and let you assume they are all customers.

Client work

  • CS3 EGS
  • Ready 3
  • Crescendo Solutions LLC
  • Ibis Innovative Solutions

Association membership

  • Oklahoma Defense Industry Association
  • CS3 EGS

02 Why the economics work

Small on purpose

Blacksmith Mission Services is founder-led and deliberately small. That is the reason the work costs what it does and moves at the pace it does. There is no account layer, no bench to keep busy, and no overhead priced into your engagement.

You talk to the person building the system. Decisions take hours instead of a change control cycle.

What this is not: a staffing arrangement. We do not place people into your organization by the hour, and we will not claim a standing engineering bench we do not have.

  • 01Founder-led coreArchitecture, build and delivery. The same person from first call to handover.
  • 02Modern methodsA small team ships at the pace of a larger one because the tooling has changed. We build with current frameworks and AI-assisted development rather than billing the hours those used to take.
  • 03Your teamWe work against your people and processes rather than around them, and we hand back code and documentation you own.

03What we do

Four ways we help contractors compete

Six capability areas sit behind these. Most engagements start with one of the four.

04Selected work

Recent builds

Scope is described as delivered work. Where an engagement cannot be substantiated in detail, it is labelled generally rather than dressed up as a case study.
The CS3 EGS website home page.

01Website and Digital Experience

CS3 EGS

A consortium site for a network of certified small businesses serving Navy and defense aerospace programs. The member directory is the working part: each company carries its own identifiers, codes and point of contact, published in a form a contracting officer can act on.

Delivered

  • Multi-page corporate website
  • Member directory with per-company contracting identifiers and code lookups
  • Content management integration for news and member highlights
  • Structured data and search fundamentals
Designed and built by BlacksmithVisit site
The Crescendo Solutions website home page.

02Website Redesign

Crescendo Solutions LLC

A full redesign for a small disadvantaged business working in technical data, integrated product support and custom software. The careers section is self-serve: the client posts roles and receives applications without touching the codebase.

Delivered

  • Full website redesign
  • Contracting identifiers and code presentation
  • Self-serve job posting through a content management system
  • Application handling and transactional email
Designed and built by BlacksmithVisit site
The Ready 3 website home page.

03Website and Digital Experience

Ready 3

A corporate site for a service-disabled veteran-owned small business in technical training, sustainment and engineering support. It publishes the full contracting profile, from identifiers and code coverage through to certifications, in machine-readable form.

Delivered

  • Corporate website
  • Contracting profile and certification presentation
  • Structured data for organization and capability information
Blacksmith engagementVisit site
The Ibis Innovative Solutions website home page.

04Website and Careers Platform

Ibis Innovative Solutions

A corporate site for a Reston, Virginia firm working across software development, systems engineering and cybersecurity for defense and intelligence customers. The careers section is self-serve, and both the contact and application paths carry layered protection against automated submissions.

Delivered

  • Corporate website
  • Job posting management through a content management system
  • Application pipeline with transactional email
  • Layered anti-automation protection on public forms
Designed and built by BlacksmithVisit site
See all work

05Operating model

What this work costs elsewhere

Published market figures, with the publisher and year printed beside each one. We have not published a price list, so our own position is written in words rather than drawn as a bar we could set wherever we liked.
What does a custom application usually cost?

  • Small and mid-sized builds, surveyed firms

    $30k to $100k

    GoodFirms, 2026

  • Complex systems, surveyed firms

    $100k to $200k

    GoodFirms, 2026

  • Most individual engagements, reviewed projects

    $10k to $49k

    Clutch, 2026The same dataset reports an average of 132,480 dollars, pulled upward by a long tail of very large builds.

Where we sitWe scope to the problem rather than the platform, which usually places a focused build well inside the lower band rather than at the enterprise end of it.

Sources for these figures (2)

06AI and intelligent systems

Useful, and boring on purpose

The useful applications of AI inside an operating business are unglamorous. Pulling structured data out of documents that arrive as scans. Moving work through a queue without somebody shepherding it. Answering questions against systems that currently cannot be asked any.

We build those into the tools your team already opens every morning, and we are candid about the tasks where the technology still fails.

We integrate and apply existing models inside the systems you already run. We do not train foundation models and we do not sell academic machine learning coursework.

AI and intelligent systems
  • 01Paper becomes dataContracts, quality records, supplier packets and inspection reports arrive as documents and land in your systems as fields you can query and report on.
  • 02Work moves without a chaperoneRouting, approvals and status updates run on their own. Human review stays in the loop at the points where judgement and accountability actually sit.
  • 03Know where it breaksFluency training covers the failure modes as carefully as the wins, so teams adopt the technology with their eyes open.

07Where we work

Markets

Who we build for, described as relationships rather than as a map of customers we do not have.
  • 01Federal contractorsSmall and midsize firms holding or pursuing federal work, including businesses carrying small business designations. Most of what we build starts here.
  • 02Defense and national securitySubcontractors, suppliers and specialist firms in the defense industrial base, and primes looking for a specific commercial capability rather than a full integrator.
  • 03State, local and educationOrganizations responding to structured public procurement below the federal level, where the process is similar and the budgets are tighter.
  • 04Commercial bid teamsCompanies answering formal requests for proposal or quotation in regulated industries, where a response is scored rather than negotiated.
  • 05Allied marketsContractors in allied countries running comparable procurement processes, where the engagement is legally and operationally appropriate.

What we do not do

  • Staffing and workforce augmentation
  • CMMC assessment or certification
  • Managed security operations and security auditing
  • Professional engineering and stamped design work
  • Logistics and supply chain execution
  • Workforce training outside AI fluency

Saying this out loud saves everyone a call. If you need one of these, we will point you somewhere better.

08In their words

What clients said

Jack delivered a polished, professional site at a fraction of what the bigger shops quoted us. What's kept us working with him long after launch is his responsiveness and ownership mentality.

Tim LawrenceDirector of Operations, Ibis Innovative SolutionsLinkedIn recommendation, June 2026.

From the initial concept to the final execution, Jack demonstrated a strong understanding of our brand, messaging, and overall business objectives. The site is clean, modern, and highly functional—exactly what we were looking for.

Jimmy MerchantPresident & COO, Crescendo Solutions LLCGiven to the Blacksmith team for website work.

He brings a level of technical curiosity, discipline, and initiative that stands out among early-career professionals entering the aerospace and defense ecosystem.

Joe "JR" RodriguezPresident and Chief Executive Officer, CS3 EGSGiven to the Blacksmith team for website work and enterprise app configuration.

Tell us what needs building.

Send the problem, not a specification. If we are the wrong people for it, we will say so in the first reply.

Prefer innovative software you can buy off the shelf? Explore Blacksmith AI

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